Liberal Activists Learn A Lesson In Compromise

April 20, 1997|By Kevin Sack New York Times

California voters didn't just tinker last year when they revolted against perceived abuses in affirmative action. They rolled out Proposition 209 and killed the program with one slice of a fast-falling blade.

New York legislators are taking a similarly tough approach to rent control, threatening to let expire a state program that has suppressed apartment rents in New York City for 50 years.

In Washington last year, ''welfare as we know it'' was not so much reformed as it was gutted.

On each of those issues, many analysts now argue, advocates for sweeping social programs adopted such uncompromising stands that they gradually alienated any constituency for reform. The result was the death or debilitation of many programs that might have survived had deft surgery been embraced as an option.

The phenomenon has changed the very definition of reform.

In many instances, reformers are no longer the people who want to adjust the programs to strengthen them; they are the ones who want to gut or abolish them. In today's political lexicon, welfare reform often means the end of welfare. Tax reform, at least as U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich proposed it recently, means eliminating capital gains and estate taxes. Period.

In fact, the strength of abolitionist sentiment recently seemed to increase.

In New York, anti-rent control legislators beat back an attempt to extend regulations. In California, a federal appeals court upheld the constitutionality of Proposition 209.

In the offices of the advocates, policy analysts, academics and editorial writers who have made a practice of defending policies to their death, there is now some belated second-guessing about that strategy.

One who argues that advocates for social programs need to learn the art of compromise is Wendell E. Primus, who resigned as deputy assistant secretary for Health and Human Services last year in protest over the effect of the 1996 welfare bill on children. He is now director of income security for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan group in Washington that lobbies for low-income families.

''With regard to immigrants, for instance, I don't think we were willing to acknowledge that there was a problem there,'' Primus said, speaking of the welfare law's sanctions against legal immigrants. ''I believe the advocates do the programs a disservice by not recognizing that sometimes the problems exist and that you need to get on top of them.''

Another Clinton administration exile, David T. Ellwood, a welfare policy theorist who is academic dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said he sensed a real tension among welfare reformers between a desire to talk about the system's failings and the fear that doing so would ''just encourage people to cut, slash and burn.''

''The welfare system had lost so much credibility by the time welfare reform was on the Republican agenda that it seemed almost impossible for people to talk about the bad parts of the bill and be believed,'' Ellwood said.

''And the tragedy is that we went way past where the American public wanted us to be, in my view. But there was nobody to say, 'Stop in the middle.' ''

Rigidity is not a trait of only the left. The right's inflexibility on the budget a year and a half ago shut down the federal government.

With an all-or-nothing approach, both sides endanger their agendas.

The die-hard defense of social programs, though, has long been a risky tactic because the programs, by definition, have limited, often powerless constituencies. Only the poor benefit directly from welfare, only the disabled from Supplemental Security Income, only minorities and women from affirmative action, only the lucky from rent control. By contrast, everyone has a theoretical interest in Medicare and Social Security, at least everyone who plans to get old, and as a result these programs appear relatively unassailable.

When a program with unchecked abuses loses its credibility, it becomes a broad target for the cost cutters. And when its supporters refuse to address or acknowledge the problems, public frustration only serves to sharpen the knives.

''In a lot of areas of social policy and public policy, we've pushed the envelope of the policy too far,'' said Peter D. Salins, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of studies criticizing rent control.

Alan Brinkley, a Columbia University historian whose 1995 book, The End of Reform (Alfred A. Knopf), documents the anti-liberal backlash that came after the New Deal, said, ''The reason liberals defend these programs almost inflexibly is that a lot of these programs have been frail from the beginning, and the reform efforts have been proposed by people hostile to them.''